In industries engaged in producing baked food products such as bread and pizza, there is a need to systematically or uniformly feed processing machinery with portioned product. These portioned products may be for example, but are not limited to, bread dough pieces or pizza dough pieces to be processed into finished product or loaded into containers for shipment. Portioned product are typically products that are accurately scaled or volumetrically cut into pieces. Some non-limiting examples of types of products that are portioned products include pizza dough, bread dough, pie base dough and bagel dough. The pieces are typically mixed in bulk and cut or dispensed from the bulk mix.
To facilitate the further processing or loading of these portioned pieces they must be fed in a stream of product into the processing or loading machinery in a uniform or systematic manner. The stream of portioned products can become improperly sequenced due to a myriad of different causes. The portioned pieces in the stream will often come from the portioning or scaling machines that measure the portioned pieces. These machines often do not produce the portioned materials at a constant rate. In some cases as these pieces are transported or conveyed, they may lose the proper timing, spacing or sequencing. A specific, non-limiting example of this can occur in the case of bread and pizza dough, where these portioned pieces may lose their sequence due to a processing step where the portioned pieces are rounded into a rough spherical shape. Similarly, the portioned pieces of dough often need to be flour coated to nullify their tackiness and this can affect spacing. During these rounding and/or flour coating operations, the portioned pieces often lose their sequence or space timing.
If this condition is not corrected, the portioned pieces may cause difficulties during downstream manufacturing processes. In some instances, with some pieces being too close together, they can drop into the next processing machine as a “double piece”, thereby causing a jam and a loss of product from the jam and the lag in the shut down of the line. In addition to increased delays in production and downtime of the line, the possibility of jams during production increases labor costs in man hours to achieve production targets and to clear the line.
Commercially available machines have worked at solving this problem by having the portioned pieces drop onto a horizontal roller conveyor where all rollers would be rotating in the same direction but each roller would have a decreased rotational velocity from the previous roller. The roller conveyor would receive portioned pieces at the higher speed end and have the portioned piece travel to the slowest end where it would drop from the conveyor as it passes over the last roller. The portioned pieces that drop onto this series of rollers would move forward and come in intimate contact with the already slower moving earlier dropped pieces. However, when the portioned piece moves forward and contacts the back of an earlier portioned piece, it is not able to push the row of accumulating earlier portioned pieces forward and therefore it will slip on the rollers it is being supported on. As the row of portioned pieces come together and push each other forward they tend to cause the row of portioned pieces to move laterally or shingle sideways thereby possibly still causing a jam. The rollers of these prior art machines being of constant diameter will give no effect to alignment of the portioned pieces. Guides are used on the sides of this roller conveyor so as to contain the row and minimize shingling but must be kept wide enough to allow for passage of miss shaped or improperly formed portioned pieces. Thus the guides should be adjusted for each size of portioned piece being run, this adjustment is often overlooked. To minimize the pushing force of the row of portioned pieces the speed of the rollers is set so that the portioned pieces will only come into intimate contact as they approach the discharge point of the roller conveyor. This tends to minimize the accumulation effect of the roller conveyor.
Thus these machines have several flaws. The short comings of these machines is that they were only capable of affecting limited changes in the spacing of the portioned pieces and are not capable of stopping and holding pieces for indexing or synchronized feeding into subsequent machines. They were also built with a fixed width roller conveyor and manually adjustable side guides to accommodate different sized pieces. These portioned pieces would often change in size due to differences in final product size and weight and were not of a consistent shape. If the pieces were badly miss-shaped or if the guides were not properly adjusted, the pieces could become jammed or two portioned pieces could become wedged between the guides on the roller conveyor.
The commercially available machines also require a high degree of maintenance. The machines are often required to run in an extremely dusty flour environment. The rollers require a high degree of maintenance to keep the flour out of the bearings. A further maintenance difficulty arises from the complexity of the drive system used to slow or adjust the portioned piece spacing, which utilized gears and chains in order to produce the progressively decreasing roller speeds. With all of these gears and chains operating in a dusty flour environment the reliability of these machines is greatly reduced.
Thus a need exists for a portioned piece-dispensing machine for adjusting the spacing of the portioned pieces for indexing and synchronizing for further manipulation. Additionally, a need exists to lessen the required maintenance over commercially available portioned piece-dispensing machines.